Local Peace Processes: Opportunities and Challenges for Women's Engagement

Citation:

Wise, Laura, Robert Forster, and Christine Bell. 2019. Local Peace Processes: Opportunities and Challenges for Women's Engagement. UN Women.

Authors: Laura Wise, Robert Forster, Christine Bell

Annotation:

Summary:
"This Spotlight outlines briefly the relationship between women and local peace processes, drawing out and focussing on a number of examples from the MENA region, and Sub-Saharan Africa. We do so in order to provide comparative information to support women’s meaningful participation and gender-sensitive approaches in local peace processes and agreements. It is sometimes suggested that women may have greater access to these local-level negotiations than to formal national peace negotiations, because they take place through mechanisms such as civil society organisations and local peace committees, rather than internationalised high level political diplomacy. However, a review of agreement texts reveals few provisions referring to women, girls, and gender specifically. Moreover, ‘institutional, economic, cultural and social obstacles’ to women’s participation prevalent at the national level are also evident in local processes. 1 Nonetheless, women are often very active at local levels of governance, and there are some striking examples of where they have been central to mobilizing, supporting, and implementing local peace initiatives" (Wise et al 2019, 2).

Topics: Civil Society, Conflict, Gender, Women, International Organizations, Peace Processes Regions: Africa, MENA, Southern Africa

Year: 2019